November 11, 2014

Alt Lit and Rape Culture - Service - Chelsea Carter

Though this essay series has focused on rape culture and literary communities, we know it permeates as many subcultures as society creates. Chelsea Carter, a veteran of the Marine Corps, examines the effects and experience of rape culture in the military in her poem "Service." "Service" is part of her thesis "Read Without Listening" at the University of Washington, which is under a five-year embargo and will be released for public viewing at a much later date. --SBB

(Use the dropdown menu next to the "open" button in the menu bar of the PDF to view the poem full-size in the Lumin PDF viewer.)

Have something to say? Email comments, questions, responses, and links to relevant articles and literature elsewhere to: rapeculture.and.altlit [at] gmail [dot] com. For the original call for submissions, see here. To read all the essays and poems in the series, click here. Chelsea Carter is a veteran of the United States Marine Corps and a graduate of the University of Washington with a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and Poetics.

6 comments:

This work was written so beautifully and creatively as to capture the trauma of rape while it's happening as well as the equally painful aftermath. The jumbled words and chopped quality of the layout momentarily confuse the reader in much the same way the victim might have been. It pulls you into it in such a way that you come away feeling the shame, helplessness and unwarranted guilt of being a victim of rape in an environment where there's nowhere to turn for help. I thank the author for her service and giving countless women (and men) a voice through this piece.

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